What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- Managers should develop further the knowledge and skills of teachers and individual learning support staff, so that they are more able to support routinely and proactively the progress and achievement of learners.
- Ensure that teachers give due attention to the needs of the most able learners, so that they progress at the pace that they are capable of and achieve their potential.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
- To improve the effectiveness of safeguarding, as a matter of urgency leaders should:
- make sure that the staff responsible for safeguarding learners have a detailed knowledge of all aspects of safeguarding; implement fully the requirements of ‘Working together to safeguard children’ and ‘Keeping children safe in education’; update the safeguarding policy and procedures accordingly and train all staff in their use
- ensure that a senior manager immediately adopts the role of the designated safeguarding lead and undertakes the relevant training; improve staff’s ability to recognise risk to learners, including, peer-on-peer abuse, in all learning and residential settings
- ensure that leaders and managers engage more regularly with a range of external professionals, accept constructive feedback and use it to inform swift and ongoing improvements to systems and procedures and to the identification and reporting practices; guided by professionals, undertake a risk assessment of the current cohort of learners, take quick and decisive action and monitor and measure the impact of the actions taken
- evaluate the work previously undertaken to improve learners’ understanding of how to keep themselves safe; take the appropriate remedial action to ensure that those learners who are able to, have a thorough understanding of safeguarding and the actions to take if they have concerns.
- To ensure that the college meets its responsibility in relation to the ‘Prevent’ duty, as a matter of urgency leaders should:
- make sure that governors and staff are trained and have a good understanding of the ‘Prevent’ duty; promote the duty to all learners and apprentices so that they have a clear understanding of the risks associated with extremism and radicalisation and a good understanding of British values; evaluate the effectiveness of the training and the promotion carried out.
- To improve the quality of teaching, learning and assessment and outcomes for learners, leaders should:
- ensure that teachers have high expectations of the progress that their learners are capable of in individual lessons and over time; improve the quality of targets set by teachers so that they focus specifically on what each learner needs to do to improve
- in discrete English lessons, ensure that teachers focus sufficiently on improving learners’ technical skills, including writing, spelling and use of punctuation
- in discrete mathematics lessons, ensure that teachers take into account learners’ varying abilities when planning assessment activities
- ensure that teachers engage individual learning support staff (ILS) in the planning of learning and assessment and improve the levels of guidance and direction that they give to the ILS staff in lessons, so that they provide learners with the appropriate levels of support and help, to enable them to make the progress they are capable of.
- To improve the accuracy of the self-assessment judgements leaders should:
- ensure that self-assessment takes into account the progress made in addressing the failings in relation to the ‘Prevent’ duty, and the impact of actions taken to strengthen safeguarding.
- ensure that governors, learners, staff, parents, carers, professionals and employers are involved in the self-assessment process and use their feedback to inform continuous improvements to the provision, keep track of the actions taken and measure the improvements over time.
What does the college need to do to improve further?
- Identify the reasons for the poor performance of students on study programmes in 2013/14 and for the disparities in performance between different groups of students. Carry out detailed analyses of performance data to understand why particular groups of students under-achieve and take decisive action to narrow the identified achievement gaps.
- Improve the support and resources available to teachers and assessors to help them develop confidence and skills in integrating English and mathematics with the curriculum.
- Improve the quality of work-based learning provision by reviewing the reasons for learners’ historically poor performance and taking swift improvement actions. Ensure that managers receive support to help them take decisive actions to improve learners’ experience.
What does the provider need to do to improve further?
Improve the quality of teaching, learning and assessment more rapidly so it is consistently good or better and enables all groups of learners to make at least good or better progress. The college can achieve this by ensuring all activities within lessons are appropriately challenging and relate closely to the skills learners need to develop for everyday life. Additionally, it should ensure all teachers record comprehensively the progress that learners make on a day-to-day basis so the college can gain an accurate picture of their learning over time. With immediate effect, make sure all staff who teach, or observe the teaching of, the increasing number of learners with very complex learning difficulties and/or disabilities, receive appropriate training and gain relevant qualifications, so that teachers can plan and support learning better and observers will be able to judge more accurately when learning is effective. Improve learners’ development of English and mathematical skills to enable them to transfer and use these skills easily and effectively in the wider everyday aspects of their lives. Ensure all teachers and assessors reinforce the importance of learners’ spelling and grammar.
Strengthen the management of the college’s training centre, Hereward Training, significantly. Make sure managers closely review how well the provision is doing and ensure all assessors support and monitor the progress of apprentices thoroughly throughout their training programme.
Increase the rigour of quality improvement processes so managers can better review the impact of their actions. In order to do this, ensure managers sharpen their use of data, including trend data, in order to review and report more effectively on what is working well and less well. In addition, make sure managers precisely identify all key areas for development in self-assessment reports and quality improvement plans and prioritise these clearly.
Ensure all reports to the governing body have enough detail and are presented in an easy-tointerpret format, to enable governors to ask much more probing questions of leaders about all key areas of the college’s work.
What does Hereward College need to do to improve further?
- Ensure all students make the maximum progress they can within lessons by: ensuring initial assessment information is used more consistently in planning lessons so they effectively meet the needs of all students, particularly the most able; improving the assessment and recording of progress for all students including the sharpness and appropriateness of targets set.
- Increase the rigour of equalities monitoring and planning by: ensuring in-depth analysis, reporting of trends in all areas of the college’s work, and reporting in more detail on the promotion of equality and diversity within lessons so that the college can monitor effectively how widespread this is and share more easily the good practice that exists.
- Improve the effectiveness of the self-assessment and quality improvement processes through the use of formal feedback from external stakeholders, the setting clearer targets and the inclusion of evidence of impact on students so that all understand clearly how best to continue to improve.
- Increase the rigour of the internal lesson observation, especially with regard to the moderation of grades. Link the outcome of individual lesson observations more closely with appraisal so that areas for development are monitored more systematically.
Areas for improvement
The college should address:
- residential and teaching accommodation
- inconsistencies in the planning, monitoring and recording of learning
- the rigour of the teaching and learning observation scheme
- insufficient training in safeguarding.
What should be improved
- employment-related activity on vocational courses
- the effectiveness of the revised arrangements for tutorial support
- aspects of key skills provision
- the standard of some accommodation and facilities.
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